Working Weekends?

I don't exactly know where it started, but I've always had an aversion to working on weekends. In college, I observed a practically religious No Work on Weekends policy. Notice it was practically religious and not actually religious. It's an important distinction because, generally and during that time of my life, this cessation of work has nothing to do with the observation of any Sabbath. However, I would put my devotion to "rest" on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays up against the most devout monks and rabbis. On Friday afternoon I would attend my last class of the week and literally would not have any plans to do anything academically productive until (rather late) Sunday evening. This might have been an admirable quality if I had been half the student my brother and sister-in-law, Jeff and Paige, were during the week. I wasn't, enough said. One disastrous semester, I had all of my classes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays save one Child Psychology lecture class on Fridays (translation: show up and be counted, but have no fear of a discussion arising to expose just how far behind you are in the reading.) I would put the books away on Wednesday at dinner time and literally not pull them out until dinner on Monday night to cram for Tuesday. Every week, at least early in the semester, I would promise myself that I'd even out the workload, but I never managed to do so. Incidentally, I don't recommend the two-day week, five-day weekend model. As free as I might have felt on a Thursday afternoon, I felt twice as terrible during manic Monday through Wednesday nights.

I have had to work on a Saturday or Sunday with different levels of consistency during my professional life. When I taught, I would invariably have papers to grade or lessons. Even then, I did as much of that work before leaving school on Friday or late on Sunday as possible so as to leave the largest manageable amount of free time in the middle of the weekend. When I was in campus ministry, our biggest gathering and one of my major responsibilities was a monthly praise meeting on Sunday evenings. When we were at Central Citadel, Sunday was the command performance of the week, preaching and teaching in the morning and ministering and counseling from lunch often through 3 or 4pm.

My work now doesn't so much necessitate working on weekends, but even so, I often leave on a Friday afternoon with plans (or at least thoughts and intentions) to pull out the laptop at some point in the weekend and work for two to three hours on something--a budget task, new content for the website, some portion of a writing task our team is working on. I bring the laptop home every night regardless of whether or not I plan to do work. I guess it's a security blanket for the modern era. I rarely find I can bring myself to actually pull the laptop out. I don't have a lot of guilt around this as my weekends are now dedicated to three children--bike riding (Riley's really got the two-wheeler down now), creative play, reading to one or all of them, etc.--the stuff of life, stuff I wouldn't trade for anything. There are also the obligations of birthday parties, laundry, mowing the lawn, etc. Somehow, though, I allow guilt to creap in on Monday mornings because I didn't work on that task for at least a little bit of time. So I come in very early on Mondays and try to "catch up" on work I didn't do over the weekend.

I guess I'm trying to figure out if I'm the only one. Do you do discretionary (I don't have to, but I should) kind of work on weekends, or do you leave it for Monday? Do you have to work on weekends because that's when your shift is or because you're a pastor? When do you find your weekends if this is the case? How do I check the guilt? Is pulling out the laptop late on Saturday after everyone goes to bed the only way? Is that healthy? Where is the sabbath in all of this?